Yesterday out for a drive Buttercup decided to develop a misfire and although I triaged by the side of the road, I couldn’t do anything and ended up getting the RAC to bring me home. Last night I carried out a self test on the ECU and all the injectors are working, or at least clicking, so I’m left with the conclusion the coil pack on cylinder 5 is defunkt. To confirm this I moved it to cylinder 4, re-wired the loom and sure enough the problem moved to cylinder 4.
Now Dave who is well known in a lot of the Audi forums pioneered a coil pack replacement back in 2005 that utilised the latest pencil coil packs that included a coil and primary stage amplifier in one device and costs a lot less than the original coil packs.
The coil pack that died is available still but Euro Car parts quoted £180 per unit, whereas the pencil coil packs are more like £30 each. A very quick calculations tells you that 5 pencil coils are less than a single unit, add to that the price of the connectors and bit of wire and you are breaking even, but at the same time cleaning up the ignition system. There is no performance advantage to be had by carrying out this conversion, it is quite simply a case of removing some old components and utilising cheaper more readily available COP’s who people like the RAC have in the back of their vans.
I’ve ordered 5 COPs and the plugs today, they should arrive over the next few days then I will get to work on the wiring loom. As I’m not fitting these into a concourse Audi I will probably replace some of the loom connectors with ones of my own design and remove even more old stuff from the engine bay.
In the next post I will cover removing the POS (Pre stage ignition) and wiring, adding the new loom plugs, wiring up the new coil-packs and hopefully going for a drive with the new COP’s.
